their faces turned to sunset
by TrisakAminawn
Summary: Batman and Robin, he said once. You can't just let them die. (I'm Robin, she said. And raised her slingshot.)


_First sacrifice to the warriors who once had their home in this island  
Whom now the rolling plain of fair Asopia covers,  
Laid in the tombs of heroes with their faces turned to the sunset.  
_  
[attributed to the Oracle at Delphi]

* * *

Robin had gotten matches on two of the five sets of fingerprints, and was doing pushups while she waited for Batman to finish the more finicky analyses. More upper body strength was _always_ useful, and a boy her age would have an easier time building it, which meant that however much training Batman required, she had better do more.

She was at least eighty percent sure Batman actively approved of this attitude. Anyway, she could watch him work with the electrophoresis machine if she did the pushups on top of the counter, and he hadn't told her to get down, so obviously he didn't _dis_ approve.

As she hit two hundred and thirty-one, the computer system chimed. "Incoming call from Nightwing," said a low, synthesized voice—not jerkily robotic, or comprised of reverberating sound layers like Oracle's, but too even and uninflected to be anyone human. Even Batman was never that toneless. Its accent was, if anything, faintly South Asian, and Robin was coming to the conclusion it might _intentionally_ sound nothing like anyone who had ever worked out of the Batcave.

"Onscreen," said Batman. His hands, keying settings into the second-to-last analyzer, did not pause.

The main screen blinked into life, showing a lean, handsome man in a tight blue and black costume. As usual in these calls, there was no mask on his face, and the lines around his eyes were visible. It was obvious, on the occasions when Robin had seen him smile, that they were mostly laugh lines, but they still made him look even older than the scattering of silver hairs near his temples managed.

"To what do we owe the honor?" Batman asked, still not looking away from his machine, though Robin had stopped studying his technique and was watching Nightwing instead, as she pushed on with her exercises. Her biceps trembled with effort, but she wasn't going to stop now. Two thirty-eight.

"Can't you ever just say 'hello?'" Nightwing asked rhetorically. "No, of course not, silly me. You're Batman."

Batman remained silent, in his you-haven't-answered-the-question-yet way.

Nightwing sighed. "I'm just checking in."

"Hm," said Batman. _Beep,_ said the machine.

"I'm fine, since you asked."

"Obviously. And Robin and I are, unsurprisingly, working."

Nightwing's blue eyes flicked over to Robin ( _two-forty-four_ ) and back. "Still the smuggling case?"

"No. We resolved that and handed it to the department. This is an abduction ring."

Nightwing's mouth twisted. "Oh. Trafficking, or…?"

"Experimenting with derivatives of the Manbat serum. Several of the early victims have reappeared, rampaging." The week they'd spent adjusting the old formula for curing Langstrom's self-inflicted curse to help Tigerman, Peregrine, Naga, and that poor kid who'd been fused with a mole had been one of the most educational Robin had had in years. She'd faked having the flu to get out of school. Then Leonida, who did _not_ want to be cured, had bruised her liver in the fight, and she'd been completely convincing as someone not quite recovered from a week of puking up her guts.

"What, they can't get volunteers?"

"They're saving that for once they've figured out how to minimize the mental effects," said Batman. Which was their best theory.

And Robin could _absolutely_ see people paying for this stuff, once the kinks were worked out. Especially since there was a relatively easy reversal. She'd love to fly on real wings, herself. But if that was the goal, that just made it more horrific that they were _forcing_ this on people. Not because they had some crazy conviction in the superiority of nonhuman animals, like Poison Ivy with her plants, but just for research purposes. To make _money_.

 _Two-fifty,_ she reached, with a particularly emphatic shove, and then folded herself back onto her knees, and started stretching out her shoulders as she let the muscles cool down a little.

"Hm," said Nightwing. His mouth a thin line.

"You've checked in. Did you need help with something?" Batman hoped the answer was yes, Robin thought. Which was interesting because he always seemed kind of mad at Nightwing, and he still sounded mad now, but she'd gotten used to watching his body language to tell when was a good time to ask questions, and he had that angle between his left shoulder and his chin that meant he was listening really hard to whatever he heard next.

"No. Not right now, I already have a lead. I heard some things on the grapevine that worried me," Nightwing said.

The open-left-ear posture closed up hard, and Batman's attention was suddenly all on his work again. Robin pivoted her right shoulder. "Did you."

"Yeah. There was a Joker Toxin spill on the river?"

That was Robin's fault. She'd _known_ they were there to make sure the drums didn't get opened or punctured, but she'd seen the gun come up and _ducked,_ not thinking about what was behind her, and the stuff had come pouring out through the bullet hole. Batman had taken care of it, and most of the casualties had been to the gang crewing the boat trying to ship the stuff out for a chemical attack on the diplomatic summit. But still.

Batman acted like Nightwing hadn't said anything at all.

"And I hear Ivy broke out after all this time and took over Robinson Park again."

They'd talked her down. Nobody got hurt. Batman didn't point this out.

"And Vic says you sent _him_ a programming problem the other day."

Batman said nothing.

"Gotham doesn't _send out_ programming problems," Nightwing pressed. "Everyone knows that. Even if there's something _you_ can't figure out…"

"Batman's feuding with Oracle again," Robin volunteered, not quite in a tattle-tale's sing-song, but definitely reporting at his expense.

Eyebrows went up. Nightwing didn't really _do_ the one-eyebrow thing; Robin wasn't sure why. "Is that so."

Batman snorted, faintly, and held a bottle of reagent up to the light.

" _Tim,_ " Nightwing said, almost warningly. This was why Robin took so much pleasure in bearing tales on him. It was always novel to see her mentor get a dressing-down.

"It was a disagreement about the security of her main servers," Batman said, tonelessly, cracking as he almost always did when Nightwing got parental. "I have suggestions that require less centralization. She relies too much on the Tower's defenses." He paused. "You'd think she'd have learned," he added, with a certain poisonous precision.

Nightwing flinched.

Batman saw. Gave a noiseless sigh, set the bottle down in its place, and stripped the cowl back so he could look Nightwing's image in the eye. (The cameras were calibrated to perceive that as looking right at them; Robin kept being impressed all over again at the _attention to detail_ everything in the Batcave showed.) "Everything is fine, Dick," he said. "We have the city in hand. Just focus on what you have to do."

"You're sure?" the older hero asked.

Batman smiled slightly. "Go chase your lead."

Nightwing hesitated for a second, studying Batman's face. For honesty, maybe. "Okay," he said, with the sharp nod that was the reason he could put together and successfully lead a team of heroes on the fly in the middle of a crisis. And one of those warm, eye-crinkling smiles. "Talk to you later, Tim. Robin," he added, nodding to her, only a little stiff. She nodded back, and then the screen went black.

Batman pulled his cowl up again as soon as Nightwing was gone, and Robin finished her stretches and went back to watching him. He'd moved on to another machine, one whose principles she didn't entirely understand, and she scooted forward to let her feet hang over the edge of the counter.

"It always weirds me out when you call Oracle 'she' and 'her,' you know," Robin confided, heels swinging. "It's not like there's anything about the voice or the face that says 'girl'…okay, what did I say? What's wrong?" Her tone wasn't particularly solicitous, but it still would have been more appropriate in addressing someone who had turned away with a look of sorrow etched deeply into their features than someone who was still working away, with barely a hitch in his movements.

Robin was getting good at reading Batman, if just the angle of his head was enough to tell her she'd upset him. "Oracle wasn't always a program," was all he said.

Robin waited. When he didn't say anything else, she prompted, "So was she human, or what?"

"Yes. Yes, she was. The first Batgirl."

Robin blinked. She'd known there had been more than one Batgirl, just like there had been more than one Robin, but there hadn't been one in a long time, and she'd never been that curious about the role. Possibly out of a superstitious feeling that if she acknowledged its existence it would grab her and stop her from being Robin anymore.

"What happened?" she asked. Because people, especially energetic martial-arts vigilante people, didn't just _turn into_ AI cores, or whatever Oracle was.

Batman's black gloves hovered over the keypad for a moment, not uncertainly but just like—he'd been distracted. He had much smaller hands than the first Batman. Robin had seen the size of the gauntlets in the glass case. "It was her legs, first," Batman said, in his most detached voice. As though he did not know what to think of the story he was telling.

"That was before I met her, but it was because of the chair that she wound up inventing Oracle. A new way to fight. Years later, after an…accident, in order to keep working in spite of the quadriplegia, she had her brain cyborgized. It was…a difficult decision, at the time. She'd refused experimental reparative therapy for her legs; she would have accepted it at that point, but it had become impossible. The implants were minimal, but they allowed her to communicate directly with her machines."

Robin nodded. Lots of people augmented their brains, nowadays, but it was risky—even if the surgeon did absolutely everything right, you tended to lose some things, and there were a lot of ways for the hardware to break down that could turn you into a vegetable. Adding in the risk of human error meant only people with questionable sanity and those with serious special needs actually got much more than a basic command chip. She wondered what kind of 'accident' had made a spine replacement impossible. A curse, maybe. If there was one new idea she'd had hammered home by this job, it was that science had a lot of trouble working around magic.

Her teacher forced himself to continue, clipped and flat. His hands began moving over buttons again; Robin didn't have the attention to spare to watch what he was doing this time. "In the end…someone smothered her, in her bed. None of us could get there in time. But it turned out she'd copied herself into the computers, in the minutes while her lungs were giving up. Before brain death set in.

"We were never close," Batman concluded, twitching one shoulder in a shrug, and turning away from the console to let the analyses run themselves out. "Which is why I can still work with her."

"But you keep saying 'she,'" Robin observed, after several tight seconds. "Even though Oracle says 'it' is more appropriate."

"I'm stubborn. And I don't believe she actually wants us to stop treating her like a person. She just thinks it will hurt less if she can pretend she isn't."

He shook his head. "That's not something she can afford to pretend. And she should know it won't work, anyway."

Robin pressed her lips together, somewhat intimidated by the weight of the revelations she had managed to trigger. Her eyes flickered toward the nearest audio pickup. Batman had locked Oracle out of the Cave's systems after their fight, but it wouldn't be the first time that had failed to work. Oracle liked to say that Tim never had been able to compete with it in computers, which had seemed like a more weirdly obvious thing to say, before tonight.

"Maybe," she said after a little while, "you wouldn't fight so much if you didn't keep trying to treat her like she's still the person she used to be."

Batman huffed in a way that might have been amused. "Maybe. On the other hand, she's been arguing with Batman since before she became Oracle, let alone stopped being Barbara. It's traditional."

"Barbara." Robin tried the name out. "That's so…" Hesitation. "Normal."

"She was always extraordinary." For a moment, the heaviness of speaking-of-the-dead was in his voice, and then it cleared, though you still couldn't have called his tone light. "Nightwing used to call her 'Babs.'"

Robin gnawed her lip for a second. "She's why he never comes to Gotham anymore, isn't she?"

"One reason."

"Is he—okay? With me?" He'd been the first Robin, after all. If he didn't think she was good enough—

Batman glanced at her, faintly surprised. "Didn't he trust you to give input and operate independently, last time we worked with him?"

She shrugged. "Yeah, but that could just have been him being nice. Or, you know, I'm _your_ sidekick, so what you say goes."

"Nightwing is 'nice,'" Batman allowed. "But he never pretends not to notice incompetence because of that. He's _good_ before he's _kind_ , and he's a professional."

"Oh."

Batman snorted. "And the day Dick decides it isn't his place to judge my decisions, I confidently expect the sky to fall and Hell to start importing parkas."

Robin stifled a snicker. "He really does treat you like a kid, doesn't he? So he would have said something if he thought I wasn't good enough?"

"He disapproves of my getting you involved, but yes. He would have said something to you. He's lost too many people to this work not to."

"Oh," Robin said again. "You didn't get me involved, though," she said after a few more seconds. "I did."

"That's not how Nightwing sees it."

Batman slid a small case out of his belt, opened it, set it on the countertop, and slid open one of the innumerable tiny drawers to retrieve a replacement for the tiny rebreather unit that should have been in the airtight case. The previous unit was currently at the bottom of the harbor.

"Have you finished restocking?" he asked, before he closed the drawer.

Robin nodded. "While you were working on the fiber evidence."

"Good."

Robin swung her heels again, watching her mentor arm up and thinking about all the things she didn't know. There were a lot of things she could guess at, from the shapes they left in the files she'd read, imprints of personal tragedy in curt tactical assessments, like footprints preserved in plaster. But she had so much to learn every day that prying into old files wasn't really a good use of time, and there was so much that wasn't in there at all.

"Oracle says you're crazy."

Batman shrugged, slightly, and sealed the rebreather case with a _click_ before tucking it into its fitted pouch. "Possibly," he said, in a way that managed to imply _she is in no position to talk._ He turned away to stock up on throwing weapons. "But then, that's traditional, too."

Robin grinned. "Well, _that's_ a relief."

"Scamp." Batman hesitated, his hand hovering over the case of batarangs as though he was actually uncertain whether he needed any. Then he swung back into motion, stowing the appropriate number away under his cape, and said, "You are, you know. More than good enough."

Robin ducked her head. "I wasn't..." Fishing for compliments. She hoped she wasn't blushing. Was pretty sure she was.

"You have good instincts. You have consistently good _intentions_. You work hard, and you think about what we're doing."

"I just," she began. She always hated it when people talked about her. Robin was different, she loved when she heard people talk about _Robin_ , but nothing good had ever come of people talking about her, as a person. Getting noticed meant getting interfered with. And Mom always said only self-involved assholes went looking for people to say nice things about them.

"Listen," Batman ordered. So she did. He'd stopped stocking his belt in favor of saying this, it was now an _assignment_. "Your performance has never failed to meet expectations. You've learned everything assigned to you very quickly. And you're brave without taking unnecessary risks, which is a very rare balance."

Robin twitched her shoulders in a breezy shrug at the last one. "It's because I'm a girl."

"Don't buy into stereotypes. The last girl who was Robin was fired within two months for recklessness and insubordination."

"Wait, what? _Really?_ I thought girl-Robin was an urban legend. I mean, until now. When was this?"

Batman's lips quirked. "Almost twenty-five years ago. It was while I was in a retirement that turned out to be more of a minor hiatus."

"You tried to _retire?_ " In his teens, at that. _Him._ She couldn't picture it. At all.

"It wasn't my idea."

Of course not. She swallowed. "Uhm…if I screw up. Will you…?"

"After he fired her, she nearly got killed. No. If something goes wrong, _we_ will deal with it."

Robin let out a breath. Turned it into a backward roll, and kicked up into a handstand. Only when her toes were pointing toward the stalactites (and her back, coincidentally, to her mentor) did she say, "Okay. Good."

Batman watched her, short red-brown hair hanging around her ears like a grimy halo. Canary-yellow cape hiding her arms and pooling on the countertop. "And if you have a problem that gets out of hand, come to me. _Any_ problem. Dealing with it promptly will always be more efficient than running triage later."

She smiled. "Keep talking like that, people will start to think you care."

He turned toward her at that. Watched her handstand fail to waver. Then: "You're Robin. I'll always care."

"Because you're Batman," she stated, swinging her feet back and forth in the air without overbalancing, confident she was finishing the thought.

The smile that touched Batman's mouth was strange, complicated; it was just as well Robin wasn't looking at his face. "Something like that," he agreed.

Robin laughed, a muffled, snorting little sound that seemed older than her skinny little frame, but still far too young for a soldier, and dropped over the edge of the counter and onto her feet, brushing invisible dust from her uniform. "You're so weird."

"Mm-hm." Belt fully restocked, Batman adjusted his gloves, pulled his cowl back over his face, and smirked. "Come on, Carrie. We have a city to keep."

* * *

 _ **A/N:** DARK FUTURE SURPRISINGLY LESS DARK THAN ANTICIPATED. THANK YOU CARRIE KELLEY. _

_Pretty sure this world went AU before 'Titans of Tomorrow,' but maybe Tim broke his oath and has just put a lot of effort into not going crazy. Having a Robin generally helps._

 _I have the idea Damian has spent the last several years missing, presumed mind controlled, and finding and rescuing him is Dick's big project, but you can pretend he's dead or nonexistent or evil, if you really want.  
_


End file.
